Today, director Oliver Stone’s big-screen version of Don Winslow’s vivid and smart-tongued 2010 novel “Savages” opens. The film turns out to be tonally flawed more than it is fun.

The crime drama relates the tale of childhood friends Ben and Chon (nee John) of Laguna Beach who put the “bud” in buddies when they begin engineering some of the most potent marijuana seeds known to expanded consciousness. Their product is so good it attracts the nasty attention of a Mexican drug cartel run by Elena “La Reina.” The beach boys’ friendship is so secure, they share the love of one woman, Ophelia or O.

Blake Lively portrays O — the entitled daughter of a serial-marrying mom we never meet. The leggy blond provides the film its intermittent narration. “Just cause I’m telling you this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end,” she begins amid cinematographer Dan Mindel’s Cali tourism board shots of Laguna Beach.

By way of explaining her seaside hometown, O says, “God parked his car here on the seventh day and they towed it on the eighth.” Ahh, deep-pocketed, slacker wisdom.

Will Buddhist Ben (Aaron Johnson) and special ops-trained Chon (Taylor Kitsch) be able to free her without selling their souls?

Which criminals — the nice ones or the really bad ones — will prove themselves, if not worthy, cunning and violent enough to claim the movie’s title? Benicio Del Toro gives an appropriately ugly turn as Elena’s muscle, Lado. John Travolta — an old hand at crime dramas that teeter on bitter comedy — moves with agility between the film’s cruel and comicality harried tones.

“Savages” points to a problem with gifted directors, which Stone is, like him or not: They can make a movie that aggravates, infuriates, falters even, but they can really make a movie.

So “Savages” has its share of compelling performances — in particular Salma Hayek’s as the drug lord with a daughter who’s ashamed of her. It also comes with an assured mix of fast-cut and measured editing rhythms.

It’s the sort of outing that makes one ponder the failings and successes of a work in a different light. To wit:

1. Oliver Stone doesn’t quite have a sense of humor: At least as a filmmaker. We don’t pretend to know him personally. With its rich cast of characters and casual bloodletting, “Savages” might be considered Stone’s Quentin Tarantino flick. Only, Stone’s already had one of those: “Natural Born Killers,” which was conceived by Tarantino. With its hairpin turns of phrase and double dealings, the movie is also reminiscent of Elmore Leonard, and not just because Travolta’s onboard. Both Leonard and Tarantino have a way of putting distance between their violence and our reality. One often gets the sense that the director of “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Platoon” — and a veteran of warfare — understands violence’s toll on bodies a bit too intimately to make the sort of movie-movie sport of it that Tarantino does. A subset of this lesson might be: Don’t send a moralist to do an amoralist’s job.

2. Our love of bandits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has always been a little complicated. As Ben, Chon and O make plans to escape to Indonesia, O struggles to recall the title of the old movie her triangle recalls. We’ve already been thinking of the winning Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross triad. Only four decades later, the charm is off the bloom some. Ben and Chon aren’t representative of some counter-culture rebellion so much as a younger version of what ails us, a “cake and eat it too” mentality. And O, spouting three times as many lines isn’t half as intriguing as Ross’ Etta Place. For a more cautionary wrangling of the Butch-Sundance saga, see last year’s western “Blackthorn.”

3. Stone must be an amazing director to work with. Why? Because, like Spike Lee (who can be bold and uneven), he gets performances good enough to mask a film’s more structural problems. Of the young’uns pushed by Stone, Aaron Johnson as Ben grows the most in professional stature.

4. Jennifer Lawrence must have a good agent. When Oliver Stone was headed to the Boulder International Film Festival in 2011, he told The Denver Post he was hoping to cast Jennifer Lawrence in the role of Ophelia. Phew. The talented Ms. Lawrence dodged a bullet or a hail of them. The Katniss Everdeen portrayer is making a habit of strong, complex female characters. It’s not that Lively isn’t solid as the well-do-to California gal, but Ophelia isn’t a richly realized figure. Her voice-over can’t mask her willed emptiness, which may be the point, but isn’t a very satisfying one.

5. Isn’t weed sort of passé? No, we don’t mean pot’s on its way out. Far from it, it seems. But Showtime’s once-fab series “Weeds” jumped the shark a few season ago. California has a thriving medical Mary Jane industry (a fact O points out). And here in Colorado, where our medical marijuana dispensaries supposedly outnumber Starbucks and guys stand on corners twirling signs for discounted ounces, this battle for turf seems a little late to the party.

One of the country’s most prestigious singing competitions for serious young vocalists is setting up shop at the University of Colorado in Boulder for the first time this year – and the public is invited to check it out.